Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: November 4, 2012

Weekly ROBLOX Roundup: November 4, 2012

Every week, we’re busy telling the stories behind our platform, our technology, and our place in the gaming and technology industries. For those of you who catch up with ROBLOX over the weekend, the Weekly ROBLOX Roundup collects the best stuff to hit our various avenues of publication in the last week. This time: Halloween at ROBLOX HQ, games that keep players coming back (and the techniques they use), an update on ROBLOX for iPad development, and everything you need to know about Raycasting — including how Paintball! creator daxter33 uses it.

While ROBLOX users dressed their characters with the Halloween-themed attire and gear released throughout October, ROBLOX developers got into the spirit, too, and we have photos to prove it. On top of that, we reported four useful tips from members of the Content Team as to how to “Halloween-ify” your ROBLOX games. Sure, Halloween has come and gone, but many of the techniques described, such as zombies and atmospheric lighting, are good all year long. Check out the blog post for the gritty details.

We’re not talking about Beekeeper Tycoon (although you’re welcome to run with that concept), we’re talking about games that keep players coming back again and again. Games that just won’t let you get away. We queried the ROBLOX database to find the stickiest ROBLOX games over the last six months, and analyzed the techniques they use to encourage repeated plays. While none of the techniques will guarantee overnight success — your game needs to be fun and well-made in the first place — it will get you thinking long-term about your game and its features.

It goes without saying that, before we can release ROBLOX for the iPad, it needs to be able to run smoothly. Over the past several weeks, the ROBLOX Client Team has been digging deep into ROBLOX’s source code to find and optimize memory-hogging tasks and files. In this Engineering ROBLOX for the iPad article, we look at some of the ways we’re reducing the memory footprint of our platform.

Raycasting is a scripting technique many ROBLOX users employ to create accurate, responsive weapons. Daxter33, creator of the ultra-popular ROBLOX game Paintball!, has a unique implementation of raycasting, which he explains in this in-depth article. Of course, raycasting isn’t only useful for weapons, so we also explain some other useful applications.

You should see this ROBLOX place

Zombiesdale is the latest project from ROBLOX user um3k (in conjunction with BLOX31), who we highlighted on the blog once before for his procedural city-generation plugin. I happened to run into him on a Zombiesdale server late last week, and he told me about some of the unique technology powering this sprawling, zombie-infested city. There’s no real “game,” but it has a well defined sense of place and atmosphere. Here are some of its unique features:

Terrain destruction (using a blend of math and raycasting for efficiency)

Algorithm that dynamically changes the color of the fog based on day/night

Procedurally generated parks; buildings by BLOX31

You can see the fog change color as night turns to day

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Ok, the halloween pic is epic and hilarious. And I have an idea, why isn’t there a newspaper? It could be attached to blog, we could put smaller things, and people could pay for advertising and stuff you’d find in a real newspaper, but based on Roblox.